LOOKFAR AT 10 YEARS
Reflections on Philanthropy, Local Leadership, and Following What Works
"Some of the best ideas come from looking at what is working rather than what is wrong."
Origins
Lookfar was founded on a simple observation: some of the best ideas come from looking at what is working rather than what is wrong. There are enough voices exclaiming the problem. We have taken a different approach, by seeking examples of uncommon progress.
This has led us to small, local groups dedicated to conserving highly biodiverse, highly imperiled landscapes. Working close to the ground, they embody a longstanding principle of community-based resource governance: people exercise the greatest practical influence over the landscapes where they live. Where those landscapes are biodiverse, stewardship becomes inseparable from protecting the world's most vulnerable and irreplaceable places.
The challenge was that while these groups were refreshing and effective, with little time for bureaucracy and self-promotion, they also had little time for project design, proposals, and donor engagement. Lookfar started out advising a philanthropic foundation. We identified small, local groups doing exceptional work, but many struggled to meet the exacting standards of a new donor. Lookfar became a bridge between foundations seeking effective conservation projects and the people quietly carrying them out.
Working alongside these groups also taught us something unexpected. Their advantage was not simply that they were local. It was that they were small. They could act quickly, adapt to changing conditions, and innovate until they lighted upon what worked.
That changed how we thought about scale. For often enough, a single instance of success in one corner of the world can spark similar solutions elsewhere. Few of these successes happen over large areas. But they can be replicated many times over at intensely local levels, blending common standards and best practices with new insights and adaptations suited to the unique circumstances of each place.
These are stories worth telling—illuminating the work of those unknown and unheralded groups accomplishing so much with so little and, in so doing, inspiring others to do the same. This is why our motto is: Look Far and Light the Way.
Experience
For the past decade, Lookfar advised foundations developing conservation portfolios while also working with small, local organizations operating in some of the world's most biodiverse and most imperiled landscapes. We saw firsthand how projects are designed, evaluated, funded, implemented, and measured.
Lookfar began in 2016 advising DOB Ecology in the Netherlands and later the Iréne M. Staehelin Stiftung in Switzerland. We helped identify prospective grantees, conduct due diligence, develop projects, negotiate grants, monitor progress, and evaluate new opportunities across Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. A key outcome of this work occurred during New York Climate Week in 2024, where Lookfar convened leaders from conservation and climate philanthropy to examine how biodiversity conservation could contribute more effectively to climate mitigation, preparing a widely circulated report on key findings.
Lookfar also has worked with small, local conservation organizations in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Suriname, and South Africa, providing counsel, connections, project design, funding strategy, and communications support. Together, we developed projects involving protected areas, ecological restoration, regenerative agriculture, scientific research, community development, education, and conservation finance.
One example is Associação Mico-Leão-Dourado (Association of the Golden Lion Tamarin or AMLD), a small Brazilian organization working in the Atlantic Forest, whose biodiversity rivals that of the Amazon and whose rate of endemism far exceeds it. Founded to recover a single endangered primate, AMLD developed a broader conservation strategy centered on connecting fragmented forests, restoring degraded land, supporting local livelihoods, and building a community committed to conservation. Lookfar helped secure funding for AMLD's purchases of Fazenda Igarapé and Fazenda Perdida, which became the Golden Lion Tamarin Ecological Park. Together, the land purchases, restoration work, and Brazil's first wildlife overpass reconnected more than 10,000 hectares of Atlantic Forest while supporting local tree nurseries, restoration crews, educational programs, and ecotourism.
Lessons
Successful conservation depends less on directing local organizations than on strengthening their ability to exercise sound local judgment. Short grant periods, restricted budgets, and narrow reporting requirements can reward activities that are easy to count while neglecting the institutions needed to sustain them. The Forests, People, Climate collaborative, for example, reflects a broader shift toward more networked approaches, bringing funders and frontline organizations together to define priorities through a decentralized and adaptive structure.
Good due diligence evaluates organizations as carefully as projects. It asks who makes decisions, how those decisions are made, whether proposals reflect local conditions, how the organization relates to surrounding communities, and whether it has the capacity to fulfill its commitments. Budgets, financial statements, and legal records matter. But so do field visits, meetings with staff, conversations with partners, and an understanding of the political, cultural, and ecological setting.
The same lesson applies to conservation investment. Land acquisition, restoration, and field programs are essential, but they are only part of the work. Legal systems, land tenure, governance, scientific capacity, communications, data systems, and organizational development often determine whether a project succeeds. Many of these investments fall outside conventional conservation budgets, yet they can produce some of the greatest long-term returns.
Monitoring and reporting should serve the same purpose. Acres protected, trees planted, people trained, and reports completed are useful indicators. But they do not establish whether local leadership has become stronger, an organization has become more capable, communities have acquired a lasting interest in the outcome, or useful knowledge will survive the grant.
Conservation also requires humility. A recent global review found that conservation interventions produced positive biodiversity outcomes in most cases and either improved biodiversity or slowed its decline in roughly two thirds of the trials examined. Yet some interventions performed worse than no action. Conservation succeeds often enough to justify confidence, but rarely enough to eliminate uncertainty.
Progress depends on experimentation, candor, adaptation, and the willingness to change course when evidence requires it. It needs what Kent Redford and Andrew Taber called a "safe fail" culture in which organizations can acknowledge failures, learn from them, and improve their work.
Time matters for the same reason. Ecological recovery, institutional development, public policy, and trust do not follow annual grant cycles. Nor does lasting conservation. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, decades of grassroots engagement and dialogue helped secure national recognition of Indigenous territorial rights and new provincial laws recognizing women as landowners. This work also included forest mapping, education, and women-led agroforestry—helping communities exercise newly recognized rights and pursue sustainable livelihoods. Such changes emerge through sustained local leadership and repeated engagement with public institutions, not through a single grant cycle. Patience should not mean weak accountability, but neither should accountability become an excuse for proscribing or abandoning worthwhile efforts before they have time to mature.
What We Learned
For much of Lookfar's first decade, the work was exploratory. We worked with foundations, conservation organizations, researchers, and communities across many countries, not to replicate what others were already doing, but to understand where Lookfar itself could make the greatest contribution.
That search gradually produced an answer. The greatest unmet need was often not another conservation project. It was stronger local institutions capable of sustaining conservation over generations.
The Chocó Alliance is the first full expression of that conclusion. It brings together eleven local Ecuadorian organizations that manage 56 reserves, protect more than 84,000 acres of forest, and work with 75 communities. Rather than directing conservation itself, the Alliance strengthens the legal, administrative, and data infrastructure that allows local organizations to remain independent while doing their work more effectively. Shared services reduce duplication, lower costs, and allow member organizations to focus on protecting forests and serving their communities.
The first decade also revealed several broader conclusions. Conservation succeeds when local organizations have the freedom and capacity to exercise sound local judgment. Funding enables the work. Strong local institutions sustain it. Lasting conservation depends on relationships built on trust between donors and local organizations, shared knowledge, and the flexibility to adapt as circumstances change. It also depends on connecting local organizations, funders, researchers, governments, and communities that too often pursue related objectives in isolation. Capacity should not be viewed as a prerequisite for investment, but as one of its principal objectives. Success is measured not simply by acres protected or trees planted, but by whether local leadership, knowledge, and institutions become and remain strong enough to carry the work forward.
Lookfar's work will continue to evolve. The landscapes, organizations, and challenges will change. The underlying principles will not. Our success will be measured, as always, by stronger local institutions, healthier landscapes, more resilient rural communities, and examples that light the way for others.
Scott Stone | 28 July 2026
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990).
Russell A. Mittermeier et al., Global Biodiversity Conservation: The Critical Role of Hotspots, in Biodiversity Hotspots 3, 4–5 (Frank E. Zachos & Jan Christian Habel eds., 2011).
Forests, People, Climate, Philanthropy Reimagined: 2024 Annual Report 5–6 (2025).
Andrew Seidl et al., Finance for Nature: A Global Estimate of Public Biodiversity Investments, 46 Ecosystem Services 101216, at 1, 6 (2020).
Penny F. Langhammer et al., The Positive Impact of Conservation Action, 384 Science 453, 454–55 (2024).
Kent H. Redford & Andrew Taber, Writing the Wrongs: Developing a Safe-Fail Culture in Conservation, 14 Conservation Biology 1567, 1568–69 (2000).
Forests, People, Climate, Philanthropy Reimagined: 2024 Annual Report 19–20 (2025).
